Items tagged with Newsfeed

Is Facebook just finally getting with the times given the immense popularity of animated GIFs (and the fact that folks that are lumbering around on ancient 56k connections are few and far between), or is it a sign that Facebook is about to travel down the same rat hole that sucked up Myspace? However you feel about GIFs, Facebook today is opening up the floodgates by allow users to go crazy by posting them to their walls. Posting a GIF to your wall is a simple affair; all you have to do is post a direct link to the image in the “Update Status” box. You can use any of the popular image hosting sites...Read more...

Chances are, you’ve noticed a gradual uptick in the amount of spam in your Facebook Newsfeed. You know the stuff--"like-baiting", spammy links to trick you into clicking on a junk website, and even seeing the content over and over again--and Facebook is trying to get rid of it. “A smaller set of publishers who are frequently and intentionally creating feed spam will see their distribution decrease over the next few months,” wrote Facebook’s Erich Owens and Chris Turitzin in a blog post. “We’re making these changes to ensure that feed spam content does not drown...Read more...

The video ads that Facebook began testing back in December are coming. The social network announced that starting today, a “select group of advertisers” will be able to post video ads that will appear in your Newsfeed and last up to 15 seconds. Like the other videos that you see in your Newsfeed, these video ads will autoplay silently as you scroll past them. If you click one, it will open in a full screen view and play with audio. What’s interesting about this launch, though, is that Facebook is not using the same old web metrics to measure their impact. Instead, Facebook is...Read more...

If you can believe it, Facebook turns 10 years old tomorrow. That seems completely wrong until you realize that February 4th, 2004 was indeed 10 years ago, even though for anyone over 30 or so the year 2004 seems more like 10 minutes ago. Facebook’s influence on the world is undeniable, with its 1.2 billion users and inspiration of a new generation of social media sites and services that have become the new way people young and old communicate and stay in touch. But things are changing in the ever-fickle tech world, and Facebook is in danger. Regardless of what the numbers may or may not...Read more...

Facebook is launching an app called “Paper” that appears to be an effort to bring you all the best news features of Facebook without actually being on Facebook. “Paper makes storytelling more beautiful with an immersive design and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts. We’ve also made it easier to craft and share beautiful stories of your own,” reads the blog post announcing Paper. In other words, Paper makes it easier and more enjoyable to catch up on news from your friends as well as the news from various outlets. In addition to your NewsFeed, which is the default...Read more...

Facebook’s new Trending feature is rolling out, and it’s pretty much exactly what you think it is--a sidebar in your NewsFeed that shows you the hottest topics trending on Facebook, with the ones Facebook’s algorithms think you’d be interested in featured most prominently. If you want to know more about a given headline, just click the subject and you’ll be taken to a new page where you can see all the content related to that story, including which of your friends has posted it or commented on it as well as any random posts related to the topic. Trending topics on...Read more...

Facebook is wading into treacherous waters. The social media giant started testing out an autoplay video feature earlier this year that would silently play videos as you scroll past them in your NewsFeed. That’s one thing is it’s videos from your friends or family, but it’s quite another when those videos are from advertisers. But that’s exactly what Facebook is planning to do. “Marketers will be able to use this new format to tell their stories to a large number of people on Facebook in a short amount of time - with high-quality sight, sound and motion,” wrote...Read more...

Facebook is expanding its advertising business by allowing different kinds of ads in your Newsfeed. Specifically, this is all part of the Facebook Exchange program (FBX), which allows advertisers to “show ads to people on Facebook based on their online browsing interests”. Previously, FBX ads would only show up on the right side of the page in Facebook, which made it easier to ignore them, but now they’ll be appearing in your Newsfeed, as well. Of course, Sponsored Stories have been popping up in our daily Facebook scrolling for a while now, but the key difference between those...Read more...

Facebook officially unveiled the promised overhaul of its News Feed today, and the result--which users will see on the Web as early as, well, right now--is essentially a live-updating social newspaper, complete with different “sections”. Citing three values that the Facebook team wanted to bring to this update--visually richer stories, choice of different feeds, and a unified experience across desktop and mobile devices--the new News Feed significantly increases the amount of screen real estate that is devoted to actual items. For example, photos appear larger than before, with the...Read more...

Brace yourselves, folks: The complaints will be coming hard and fast, mostly via Facebook, as the social juggernaut is planning to yet again tweak its look by rolling out a revamped Newsfeed. All the details will be revealed on March 7th at a press event on Facebook’s Menlo Park (California) campus, but a few folks have snuck a look ahead of time. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine claimed that he saw a working version of the mobile Newsfeed in person and stated that it “creates separate feeds for a few different content types including news and photos”. Navigation entails swiping...Read more...